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A few weeks ago, our Western Region was lucky enough to host a volunteer group from Webmarketing123, a digital marketing agency in the San Francisco Bay Area. Greg Hanano, a Marketing Research Analyst at Webmarketing123, wrote a wonderful post about their experience that we wanted to share here:

A couple weeks ago, our company dedicated a morning to volunteering at a local non-profit organization, MedShare. MedShare is dedicated to improving the environment and healthcare through the efficient recover and redistribution of surplus medical supplies and equipment to undeserved healthcare facilities in developing countries. They are a group of people dedicated to helping developing countries get the supplies they need, while keeping medical surplus out of landfill. The organization began in 1998, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and opened the 2nd location in San Leandro in 2008.

When local Bay Area hospitals have a surplus of supplies (which is not uncommon), they are placed aside for MedShare to pick up, segment, organize, and distribute for shipment to the countries in need. When a hospital in a developing area needs supplies, they can easily place an order with MedShare. Volunteers (like us) sort through the supplies to prepare for incoming orders. We took out items that were expired, separated the tools that were in condition to ship, and crated the supplies into individual boxes.

MedShare is bringing awareness to issues in the world that are rarely in our day-to-day minds. “There is a shortage of supplies in third world country hospitals, and we throw away hundreds of supplies every day.” It is important to realize that these are not expensive or rare supplies, but simple hospital necessities like gloves, cotton swabs, or string for stitches. Doctors working in these areas of need have had to hang up their gloves because they cannot throw them away. This is a huge health hazard causing the spread of infectious disease. This is something that has stuck with me. Every country should be able to use clean medical supplies with every patient and yet, something as simple as clean gloves can be a rare and expensive privilege.

After our briefing, we took a tour of the warehouse and got started at our tables. There we began our work by sorting through a large pile of supplies and separating them into their bins. This was the best part of the process. As a company, we worked together and bonded while efficiently filling 170 boxes of supplies, ready to be flown to different countries in need.

I am so glad that we, as a company, got to share this time together. This is a great place for companies to help out the community and the world, while bonding at the same time. What pains me most is that great non-profits, like MedShare, could make a bigger impact if they could expand to every major city in America. MedShare has been struggling to get their brand name noticed. That’s where we come in. WebMarketing123 has decided to start a foundation, dedicated to providing free digital marketing services to non-profit organizations. The new foundation will help other nonprofits spend their Google advertising dollars wisely, increase their following on Facebook and Twitter, and boost their organic search rankings. When a non-profit is more noticeable, that’s when they get more help, more donations, and increase the opportunity to make a big impact on the world.

More information will be released soon about Webmarketing123’s non-profit foundation. Please keep in touch with us at#wm123 and check out our blog for new updates. To learn more about MedShare and how your company can get involved, visit www.medshare.org.

The staff at MedShare would like to thank the wonderful Webmarketing123 team for taking the time to sort and box medical supplies. Without volunteers like them, we wouldn’t be able to achieve our mission of bridging the gap between surplus and need.

If you’d like to volunteer, click here to sign up. Opportunities are available in both the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the Atlanta area.

Both have done a wonderful job thus far, and we’re lucky to have them on board. In the month they’ve been at MedShare, they’ve collectively entered 9,000 boxes of medical supplies into MedShare’s inventory, and we had cake this morning to celebrate that accomplishment.

On average, each container shipment that MedShare sends out contains 1,000 boxes of supplies. That means that these ladies have, in effect, readied 9 containers of supplies to be sent, and also made available these boxes to be ordered by recipient hospitals via our online ordering system. In doing this, they’ve freed up a significant amount of space in our warehouse that had been designated to hold these boxes.

Welcome to MedShare, Crystal and Jacqueline, and thanks for your great work so far!